In Times of Fading Light

“Zatchem?” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna. What to?

It wasn’t really what she wanted, but suddenly they were all drinking to her, telling her to drink up herself, never mind, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, she would allow herself a little nip on Wilhelm’s birthday, she tossed the schnapps back, but at the very moment when she tossed it back it occurred to her that you didn’t do that kind of thing in Germany, in Germany you only sipped from a glass, she felt a little embarrassed to have made a slip like that, and furthermore the stuff tasted horrible, she wasn’t used to drinking these days, she felt the alcohol go to her head, and after a while it seemed to her that the people here were talking faster and faster, the rasping German sounds were rasping right in her ears, such an urge to communicate almost made her feel dizzy, so much as all that couldn’t have happened since last year, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, the only item of news she could think of was that Sasha was in America.

“Sasha v Amerike,” she told the man with the sad eyes.

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” said the man.

He reached for the schnapps bottle to pour her another nip, but Nadyeshda Ivanovna vigorously repelled the attempt. She was already so tipsy from one nip that she even began hearing Russian words among all the rasping German sounds, or to be more precise a name: it was Gorbachev, somehow or other she knew it from TV, or was she just imagining that, the man with that mark on his forehead, yes, there was a man like that, but why they kept showing him on American TV was a mystery to her, surely he was one of ours— wasn’t he?

Here came Melitta, Sasha’s ex. Nadyeshda Ivanovna knew her at once, although she’d dolled herself up like a boyarina. Now that she was divorced from Sasha, Nadyeshda Ivanovna felt less well disposed to her, she had to admit, the way he’d lost weight back then was a disaster, poor boy, and her great- grandson, Markus, very seldom came to visit now. When he was little he used to sit on her lap, like Sasha in the old days, and she’d sung him the song about the little kid, although he didn’t understand a thing, he didn’t understand Russian, Markus didn’t, they didn’t teach him Russian. For a while he used to come and see her now and then in her room to get a chocolate, but she wasn’t supposed to give him that kind of thing, Melitta carried on about it as if it was poison, and then he didn’t come anymore, she couldn’t even remember when she’d last seen Markus, he’d shot up tall but he was thin as a broomstick, and pale like Jesus on the cross, no wonder if he never had anything sweet to eat.

She saw Markus giving his great-grandfather a present, they said something to each other, then the boy began saying hello to the people at the table, and as he came gradually closer Nadyeshda Ivanovna summoned up all her linguistic knowledge so that she could at least greet her great-grandson in German, for safety’s sake she said the word to herself a few times before he was finally beside her, offering his hand like a good boy, it was a fragile and delicate hand, its pressure was weak, but he had a fine face, his forehead was high, and his dark curls reminded Nadyeshda Ivanovna very much of Sasha.

“Affeederseyn,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna.

Her great-grandson looked at her in surprise, then looked at his mother and laughed.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Markus.

And then he was gone. Removed his delicate hand cautiously but firmly from hers, and disappeared.

Nadyeshda Ivanovna looked at her hand, it suddenly seemed to her as if she’d hurt him with that coarse, worn-out, potato-harvesting hand, that sawmill hand, she looked at the alarming veins standing out on the back of her hand, the wrinkled skin on the knuckles, the fingernails left all knobbly by injuries large and small, the scars and pores and folds and the palm of her hand furrowed by hundreds of lines. In a way, she could even understand that he didn’t want a hand like that taking hold of him.

Then the rasping German sounds died down. Nadyeshda Ivanovna looked up; a man with a red folder appeared, she knew at once that he was the man who’d come to give Wilhelm his order, he got an order almost every year, it was an act of state, and there was a paper with it saying what he was being awarded the order for. The man now read it out from the red folder that he was holding open in his hand, Nadyeshda Ivanovna listened reverently, even if she couldn’t understand the details she got the general drift, she knew this was about important things, she leaned back in her armchair, her eyes wandering to the big window while the speaker told the story of Wilhelm’s life, dusk was falling, the only daylight left was in the treetops, the leaves in the crowns of the trees danced soundlessly around one another, and Nadyeshda Ivanovna thought she caught a breath of evening air, the coolness on her face that you feel when you had raked up the embers, turned away, and trudged home over the suddenly dark potato field… Soon, after the harvest, it was Nina’s birthday, in mid-October, sometimes snow had already fallen, but it wasn’t cold yet and there was a good atmosphere, they’d all brought in their potatoes, it was time to celebrate, the day before they’d made pelmeni together, and then there was singing and dancing and then singing again when everyone had had a little drink, they sang the sad songs, then they all shed tears and fell into each other’s arms, ah well, and then there was more dancing, it was like that in Slava, thought Nadyeshda Ivanovna, and she almost forgot to clap when the speech was over and the man giving the order pinned it on Wilhelm.

Then those German sounds were rasping away again, they rasped and jabbered past her ears, but that didn’t bother her now, the schnapps had settled, her body felt warm and her heart felt light, and in her mind she was in Slava, in her mind she was walking along Bolshaya Lesnaya and saw it all very clearly: the iron-ore red of the straight gravel road that, when you looked along the road, ended in the pale yellow of a grove of birch trees far away in the distance; the ditches beside the road where pigs wallowed; the well and the wooden sidewalks; the fences as tall as a man, with single-story wooden houses concealed behind them, and one of those houses had once been hers. Oh yes, a long time ago, she remembered, when her hand had still been young and delicate, as young and delicate as the hand of her great-grandson Markus, and a wise woman had read her future in that delicate and barely legible hand and foretold prosperity and good luck for her—and that was how it had turned out. She had had a house of her own, a little farm of her own, even a cow in the end, a cow with a coat patched brown and white, and she had called the cow Marfa in honor of her mother, who hadn’t lived to see it.

Yes, it was all perfectly simple. She’d go to Slava for Nina’s birthday, she had the visa. She’d sit in the kitchen with Nina, spooning up curdled milk. They’d make pelmeni together, and then they would celebrate, all of them who were still left. And then she’d die, just like that, it was perfectly simple. She would die there in her native land, she would be buried there, where else, how lucky, she thought as the German noises jabbered in her ears, how lucky that it had occurred to her here and now, at Wilhelm’s birthday party, but she didn’t tell anyone, she wasn’t that stupid, and she would change the money she kept in her pillow into rubles.

“Nu davai,” she said to the man with the sad eyes, pushing her little green metal cup over to him.

The man with the sad eyes poured Nadyeshda Ivanovna another nip, and laughed.

“Nadyeshda Ivanovna,” said the man.

“Da zdravstvuyet,” cried the moist-handed man.

“Bogh s toboyu,” said Nadyeshda Ivanovna, and she tossed the nip of schnapps down her throat in a single draft.

1966

They had come out of Russia ten years ago to the month. The same milky white sky had covered the fields, here and there, if you looked closely, buds were already sprouting, but from a distance the landscape had been just as colorless as it was today, the towns and villages just as sparsely populated, and Kurt remembered staring through the window of the minibus at that out there, allegedly his native land.

They had had gold teeth made for them with the last of their money, one incisor each, so as to look right in Germany. They had packed their best clothes in an extra case, planning to change into them, after days of rail travel, only just before they arrived, but even as Kurt got out of the train and saw Charlotte and Wilhelm standing on the platform, he struck himself as a shabby sight in his carefully mended jacket and wide-legged pants, the garments that he had thought perfectly all right just a moment ago. Wilhelm had booked a minibus, obviously expecting them to bring vast quantities of baggage, but when they had sorted out their things back in Slava almost nothing seemed suitable for life in Germany, and their goods and chattels shrank to the contents of two small